


Embers

by brigantines



Category: Promare (2019)
Genre: Don't copy to another site, Fire, M/M, Mildly Dubious Consent, Post-Movie
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-09-25
Updated: 2020-05-24
Packaged: 2020-10-28 09:17:15
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,907
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20776178
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brigantines/pseuds/brigantines
Summary: Lio says, like an asshole: “The Promare inside you are mine.”As if Galo is supposed to know what to do with that.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Listen, I don't want to make "parasite fantasy" into a tag because Promare is not really Like That, it's just that Galo has seen a hentai before and he knows where this is heading
> 
> also spoilers obvs

It’s been more than a week since The Thing Happened, and while Galo understands perfectly that there are bigger issues to worry about, like the city being torn to pieces and people dead and people needing help and just, every possible thing--

The thing is, he can still feel them. The Promare, or whatever they’re called. He can still feel them under his skin, dancing like little sparks when he least expects it. Squirming deep and hot in his belly.

It’s. Well. There are stories, stupid stories that Galo never really believed in, but of course there are nasty rumors about the Burnish being able to infect “normal” people. There are stories that the Burnish eat babies and dance naked in volcanoes and are actually lizard people from the Earth’s core. There’s no evidence behind any of it, and he’s pretty sure now that Kray would’ve turned the whole city into an army of Burnish batteries if he’d discovered a way to do it.

But still. Stories. Rumors. That the Burnish do it all the time, passing through society, brushing a hand over someone’s desk or standing behind their victim in an elevator, sharing their oxygen. Maybe it’s airborne. Maybe it’s like a horror movie, someone holding you down, bleeding on you or whatever. Pushing something foreign into your body. 

“That’s ridiculous,” Lio says calmly, when Galo finally squirms and fidgets his way into confessing. “If it were possible, it would’ve happened thirty years ago. It’s not-- it has nothing to do with blood or tissue or DNA, or we’d all know that it was hereditary.”

“Even if we could give it to someone else,” he adds, “we wouldn’t. I wouldn’t, and I wouldn’t allow it. The Burnish are not a disease.” 

You did it to me, Galo doesn’t say, and Lio’s smile is like a knife across his sharp, pretty face.

“You’re different, Galo,” he says gently, so gently it makes Galo want to shiver and punch him at the same time. 

Lio says, like an asshole: “The Promare inside you are mine.”

As if Galo is supposed to know what to do with _that._

He’s not a total idiot. He knows full well that carrying Lio’s fire is the only thing that saved his life, the only thing that let them win and save the planet. They’d needed to share it. Galo had needed to be filled with it like, like a vessel, carrying a spirit stronger than his own. He gets now why the Burnish couldn’t stop starting fires. It had been a stupid accusation. He might as well have asked why they couldn’t just stop breathing, or using their eyes, or wanting to be warm when they were cold. 

Of course they couldn’t stop. It was the touch of a god, flooding through your veins. It was indescribable fearlessness and pleasure and euphoria. It was more power than any human should ever have. Galo still has nightmares every now and then about the apartment blaze when he was a kid, but when he’d carried Lio’s flame it hadn’t felt frightening or alien. It felt right. It felt good.

He considers sometimes, with a nasty, guilty sort of horror, the idea of Kray doing it instead. Gripping his burned arm. Holding his head still. Breathing incandescent flame into his mouth, into his lungs, forcing them to expand. A torrent pushing down his throat, charring him from the inside out. It throws him into confusing flashbacks from that night, of Kray carrying him effortlessly, the hot air choking him, his hands clutching weakly at Kray’s broad shoulders. Kray had held him like he weighed nothing. Kray had breathed like a bellows in the smoke-filled air that kept tears running down Galo’s face and his chest full of razors, killing him by degrees. 

He’d held Galo still for the paramedics when Galo tried to struggle, half-delirious and terrified. The smoke had stolen Galo’s voice and he couldn’t stop coughing, he couldn’t get a breath in to scream or shout. Galo remembers the bruising strength of Kray’s fingers, pressing him down while the paramedics spoke over his head, issuing orders that Galo couldn’t comprehend as language. 

“Stop fighting,” Kray had growled directly into his ear. Galo had forgotten it, actually. He’d told himself for years that Kray’s voice didn’t sound like that, dark and furious and rumbling, like a threat of thunder.

The Thing with Lio hadn’t been at all similar, of course. No grabbing, no holding immobile. Galo had been the one desperately trying to push breath back into Lio’s lungs, willing those leaping sparks from his own body into Lio’s. He’d thought of it as giving it back, an ember he’d protected and sheltered and kept from going out, so he could hand it back like passing off a torch. He wasn’t a Burnish, after all. He couldn’t control it or summon it up like Lio could, the sparks don’t really belong to him. 

The thing is. The thing _is._

He thinks they’re growing. 

Aina’s caught him a couple times now, holding his hand under scalding water. Reaching for something hot when he should know better. It’s ridiculous, he knows exactly what it looks like when a Burnish awakens. Their core temperature increases radically. Even the calmest person flips out and the flames erupt. Sometimes it looks like they’re having a seizure. Sometimes their clothes start to singe, or their watches or jewelry start to melt and drip away. Galo remembers the woman he’d rescued lying on the grass, screaming silently, her face a rictus of terror as she’d burned him without meaning to. 

There are no flames on his skin. Even in the dead of night, when he looks around furtively and cups his hand close to his body and thinks, go ahead. 

Obviously he doesn’t _really_ want there to be flames. Obviously. He’s a firefighter. He’s seen firsthand the pain and destruction that fires cause, even for the Burnish that start them accidentally. 

Also, he would have to tell someone. That would be his duty. _He_ wouldn’t hide it like Kray, letting it fester.

Lio has told him quietly that most of the Burnish have lost their powers, now, as if Galo is the right person to be telling that to. Mad Burnish is a biker gang and Burning Rescue is not a governing body and yet somehow they’re all holding the fragile future of Promepolis in their hands. Lio could’ve taken his people and vanished off into the wastelands or whatever. Galo is amazed every day that he’s still here, helping dig out rubble and ordering the remaining members of Mad Burnish not to start fights and staring down racists dumb enough to say things to his face and wearing his weird stupid gloves, and always standing just at the edge of Galo’s vision.

Anyway, those Burnish that do still have their powers are apparently finding them weaker and weaker. Not everybody, but a majority. They’ll be ordinary humans again, for better or worse. The Promare that lived inside the Earth’s core were huge, propagating and growing for thirty years. Gods, perhaps, while the Promare that live inside Burnish are just little fires, joyful and childish. Maybe the smaller ones are more willing to stay while the older ones migrate, following the path of their… ancestors? Rulers? Deities? Maybe they’ll all leave eventually, growing up to join their kindred in that other place.

That’s just Lio’s opinion. Galo doesn’t get how Lio can think of himself as a “little fire,” given he’s probably the strongest Burnish still alive and powered, but Lio’s told him firmly that he’s not as strong as he used to be, and that’s okay. 

“My fire is meant to protect the Burnish,” he says, unconsciously squaring his tiny goddamn shoulders the way he always does when he talks about the Burnish. “To show them a path to the future they’d given up on. It’s not for anything less. If there’s less of a need to protect them, then I don’t need that kind of strength.”

Lio is so exquisitely careful with his flames. Galo hadn’t noticed, when they were trying to kill each other. Lio lets them run free over his body, sometimes, little wisps of flame twisting and swirling. They skitter under his collar and dart underneath the bright halo of his hair. They cling to his earrings. 

They move under his clothes, sometimes, and Galo tears his eyes away when Lio looks at him looking. 

But! But. The point is, there haven’t been any flames for Galo. Not a single tiny wisp. Even the weakest Burnish can still produce something like that, so he doesn’t know what to think. It stands to reason that whatever Lio gifted him ought to be fading away by now.

He doesn’t think they’re fading away. 

Sparks, tingling along his nerves. Living under his skin. He wouldn’t call it pain, exactly, but it’s not entirely pleasure either. The nape of his neck prickles. His muscles shiver. 

Aina eyes him suspiciously when he starts wearing a shirt again. 

This is Lio’s fault, clearly. The Promare must be like tiny magnets, arrowing in on the presence of their fellows. They must be able to sense other Burnish, because Galo finds himself hyper-aware of Lio’s presence. His head turns before Lio speaks. He’s always-- leaving space, like his body had been carved around an absence and he can’t stand in the middle of a doorway anymore. 

He thinks of sunflowers turning in the fields, following the path of the sun. The fizzy glittering feeling races down his spine at the least convenient moments and makes his breath come a little shorter. And when Lio touches him--

Galo holds an icecube in his cupped palms. The fluttering in his stomach is driving him crazy. He tosses and turns on his bed and tries to think of snow and metal. Crisp white lines. An iceberg floating in a frozen sea. A, a, a cold tile floor, pressing against his cheek, cooling his flush.

One of his hands has crept down to clutch at his belly while the tiny little alien flickers inside him dance and dance and dance. Sweat trickles down his spine.

He thinks of Lio’s black armor fragmenting away like campfire sparks, revealing pale skin and fierce, flashing eyes, as his other hand traitorously grips his cock. The Promare are into this, apparently. Promare are perverts, pinging joyfully along his nerves as he comes in record time, and finds himself still hard. 

What do Promare look like, really? Do they hold still inside him, alight on his internal organs like butterflies, flexing tiny wings of fire? When his skin tingles and prickles, are they swarming in a frenzy? 

Lio lays a gloved hand on his arm. Lio watches him like a predator, his violet eyes glittering and lit strangely from within like stained glass. Galo wonders how no one ever saw it. The air around Lio is a heat shimmer, a warning, and the light flickers across his pale hair and his strange eyes in jewel tones. The colors of Burnish fire. 

Galo doesn’t understand how people can look at Lio and not see the dragon. His teeth are so white and so sharp, delicately sinking into the line of Galo’s neck. His breath steams in the room-temperature air. The inside of his mouth isn’t pink or plush. 

It’s red.

“There’s something Burnish do, when we meet,” he tells Galo conversationally, because Lio loves to say horrible things conversationally. Case in point: his hands are full of pink and violet and blue fire, the sort of shit that still makes Galo’s heart start hammering. There’s no convincing his eyes and his nose that he’s not in mortal danger. 

Galo swallows hard. “Yeah?”

The corner of Lio’s mouth lifts. “We let our flames mingle.”

He’s waiting for Galo to flinch, except he knows Galo won’t flinch, and Galo opens his fucking mouth and what comes out is “Oh, like shaking hands, right?”

It’s not like shaking hands. It’s not anything like shaking hands, and also Galo _isn’t Burnish_ so it’s lost on him anyway--

Lio doesn’t even pretend to go for Galo’s hand. He reaches up slowly, slow enough to make anxiety sweat prickle on Galo’s bare shoulders, and cups his fucking face in his burning, terrifying hands. 

Lio Fotia doesn’t close his eyes when he kisses. His red, red mouth opens to Galo’s, and Galo doesn’t remember bending down but clearly he did because they’re kissing, and it’s much better than that time when he thought Lio was going to dissolve into ashes and blow away, and Lio breathes out scorching hot air, dragon’s breath, and Galo helplessly, recklessly breathes it in--

He feels them again. Squirming. Flickering. In his mouth, down his neck, down his chest, a blush of heat racing over his skin. Sparks on his tongue, electricity crackling along his teeth. Does his entire skull light up like a flashbulb, etching his shadow into the wall? Does he taste metal? Does he taste anything human in Lio Fotia’s kiss? 

Whatever touches Galo’s tongue knows what it’s doing, sliding into his mouth with a shocking confidence. He thinks of the exaggerated features of Lio’s armor, solidified flame making Lio taller and wider and-- extending his reach-- and does his best not to make a humiliating noise, considering what Lio could be pushing into his mouth, forcing his jaw open around it. 

He clutches Lio’s slick, leather-clad shoulders. It’s not like the kiss of life. It’s not like that at all. There’s a roaring in his ears and shit, he hopes they’re not burning the whole building down while Lio pours-- _something_ down his throat, not fire, not air, singing into him. 

Lio’s hand rests delicately on his stomach, as if he can feel them there. As if he knows how it makes Galo feel. 

How many Promare can a human body hold. How many it would take to fill someone to capacity, lining their veins and their tongue and their eyes. Moving in their hair. 

Galo’s knees buckle, a sudden betrayal, and as their mouths part and Galo pries his eyelids back open he sees it: the small but unmistakable waver of Burnish flame in the air between them. 

The roiling firestorm he was imagining isn’t there. The building is fine. Galo’s shirt is the only casualty, except… it’s not charred away to asymmetrical rings of bare skin in the places where _Lio’s_ hands had rested. And there are singe marks in the telltale shape of fingers on Lio’s leather jacket-- his new leather jacket-- which he inspects calmly. 

“So it’s not going away, I see,” Lio says conversationally (horribly), while Galo stares at his own hands in horrified betrayal. That’s twice now, Captain Ignis is going to demote him back to sitting in the truck.

“Galo.” Lio is watching him carefully now, going down on one knee to look him in the face. This isn’t cool aloof Lio, or coldly angry Lio. This is Lio from the cave, trying to breathe life back into a dying girl. “I didn’t realize what I gave you was still active. I thought you were acting strange-- stranger, than usual,” he amends, because he’s an asshole, and Galo wants to tell him so, but he’s having too much trouble getting his breath back. “You said I was your first fire. I assumed-- the way you kept looking at me--”

“_You_ said this couldn’t happen,” Galo wheezes desperately, interrupting, because he cannot let Lio finish that sentence. He clutches both hands over his stomach where every single Promare is throwing a parade. “You said-- not contagious.”

“It’s never happened before.” Now Lio looks concerned, which is a terrible look that should never be on his face and especially never directed at Galo. “I could push power all the way through you and it wouldn’t catch if you weren’t already Burnish, that’s just not how it works. You might _die,_ but you wouldn’t suddenly become a host. The fire doesn’t share.”

Galo points emphatically at the ruin of his shirt. With both hands. 

Lio retaliates by stripping off a glove with his teeth, which is uncalled for, and putting his palm flat against Galo’s stomach again, which is _extremely_ uncalled for, as every single Promare in his entire goddamned body goes wild and he loses a little time.

When he comes back, his underwear is wet, and there are sirens screaming nearby because Galo’s life is hell, now. He just blacked out and also came in his pants and oh also might be a Burnish now, and the Captain definitely won’t let him go on a call like this. 

Lio sits back on his heels, unfazed. “Maybe I can draw them out of you,” he suggests. “We’ll try later. Don’t stand up yet, I’ll tell the others you’re sick and you can’t pilot right now.”

“‘M not sick.” Galo glares at his uncooperative legs. “I’m going. I’m gonna go. I’m-- burning soul, firefighter, _fighting fires._”

“Stay here, Galo.”

“_Make me,_” Galo snarls, and then yelps as Lio narrows his eyes and honest to god surrounds Galo with a wall of flame, like a time-out prison. Galo knows exactly how long Lio’s fires are able to keep burning, even when he’s not close by. 

“Oh, dumb baby jail,” Aina says when she sees it, because Lio didn’t say Galo couldn’t go on the call, he had to say that _Galo wasn’t feeling well,_ and someone should keep an eye on him while Lio and his biker gang buddies zoomed off to do Galo’s job. 

“Put it out, Aina,” he begs, because this is what his life has come to. “This is stupid, I’m not sick.”

“You look a little sick, you're all sweaty and red-faced. Lio said you collapsed.”

“Lio doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Go get your sidearm, c’mon, you can’t have a fire burning in the fire station.”

“Heris, look,” Aina calls, waving her sister over. “Dumb baby jail.”

“Stop calling it that!”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> a tiny update for the anniversary stuff

***

Every now and then, Galo goes back to the block where that apartment building once stood. 

The firefighters hadn’t been able to save it. Galo remembers the building being so tall and sturdy, a comfortable, immovable brick stretching from street to street, but the fire gutted the middle, and everything began to collapse in on itself. 

There were still people inside. Burnish fires devoured so quickly, and those were the days before all the anti-Burnish technology. 

Galo had been safely imprisoned in an ambulance by then, oxygen mask on and ordered firmly not to move off the stretcher, while the back doors were left open as everyone ran to deal with more severe cases. His view was the ceiling, but he could still hear the roar of flames and the shouts, the swelling panic of the growing crowd. He could see the smoke. He could see the hellish red gleam reflected on the ambulance’s chrome doors, moving and churning as it ate his neighbors and his home and his life. 

He’d stared upwards and tried to breathe and not cough, and the tears ran hot and endless down his face. 

Then came the rumbling. Then came the screaming, as the supports melted or cracked and people realized what was about to happen. As the top floors began to fall. 

The crowd gathered outside screamed with those trapped inside; terror and helplessness and despair rising to a fever pitch, sharing it the only way they could. 

Galo couldn’t scream with them. His throat was shredded. He sobbed silently and and writhed and wriggled his tiny, skinny arm out of the gurney straps to reach for those half-open ambulance doors, to reach for those people, howling in unison, his trembling fingers silhouetted against the reflected red glare. 

The hand that caught his was huge and hot. It felt like a vise, like the grip of something inhuman.

“Don’t,” Kray Foresight told him heavily, leaning down into his line of sight. A shock blanket shrouded his massive shoulders, hiding the absence there, and his face was covered in shadow. “Don’t.” 

Galo stared at him, uncomprehending, but Kray only glanced towards the half-open doors, the firelight running red over the still, chiseled planes and angles of his face. His hair was a bloody halo. His eyes were slitted nearly shut, perhaps against the pain of his injury. 

He spoke, finally, reluctantly, like the words were being forced up from somewhere down deep, slow-moving magma seeping up through cracks in the rock. He said, “Those people are already gone,” and Galo believed him, even when the paramedics came back, sweaty and smoky and a little wild-eyed, and began to make forcefully cheerful noises about getting everybody to the nearest hospital, as if Galo could expect to find all of them assembled there, alive and breathing. 

But the paramedics couldn’t quite look at him as they said it. There were bloody streaks on the gloves they hastily stripped off, and under the smell of smoke an awful carrion stink clung faintly to their clothes. 

Kray said nothing at all. He held Galo’s hand, because the paramedics asked him to do it, to keep the hysterical child calm. Kray held himself motionless while others scurried around him, doctors and nurses and people with clipboards all peppering them both with questions and cold gloved hands and instruments, poking and prodding. Kray was an island of calm in the middle of chaos. Galo clung to his hand like a lifeline as they were moved from one room to another by increasingly harried orderlies, apparently forgotten and discovered every time someone pushed aside a curtain and found them there. 

“Injuries?” one of them demanded, furiously rifling through a stack of papers. A streak of blood marred his forehead, and Galo stared at it mutely, clutching Kray’s hand even harder.

“Smoke inhalation for the boy,” Kray told him, when the silence stretched and it became clear someone had to answer, and Galo couldn’t. “He can’t speak. Cuts, bruises.” 

The orderly shoved a handful of papers at him. “Fill that out. Someone’ll be back around. We’re cramming people in closets, there’s too many--” But he stopped, seeing the way Galo’s mouth was trembling-- “Anyway, uh, just fill that out.”

Eventually someone came and took the papers, and said again that someone else would be around. Eventually they took Galo’s ruined clothes and wrapped him in a thin hospital gown and set him in a wheelchair, as if there was something wrong with his legs, and shunted him off to a cold, tiny room by himself, ignoring the anxious looks he kept throwing behind him. They chattered around him like birds, nonsensical, not so much talking to him as talking _at_ him, in a gibberish litany of right this way, you’ll be fine in no time, and don’t you worry about a thing.

Galo was worried about dozens of things, but he couldn’t speak to say so. The bright lights overhead hurt his smoke-irritated eyes and sharp antiseptic smells filtered past the oxygen mask, making him want to cough. He stayed in the empty room as long as he could stand it, and then he took the mask off himself, and crept silently on bare feet back down the hallway to the room where Kray had been left sitting, patient as a stone Buddha. 

There was commotion in distant parts of the hospital, raised voices and frantic beeping noises. Galo thought of the medical dramas his mother and aunties watched, of doctors in flapping coats and nurses running through the halls, yelling to each other over the sounds of people in crisis.

The lights overhead made deep shadows of Kray’s face as Galo wavered in the doorway, clinging to the handle, the tile floor freezing under his bare, aching feet. Kray was still in his sooty, ruined clothes, as if no one could be spared to come and look at his injuries after the paramedics had dubiously pronounced them cauterized. 

Galo didn’t ask permission to come in, and Kray didn’t tell him to leave. Kray only watched him steadily, silently, like a snake watches a bird.

Galo watched him just as closely as he took one cautious step, and then another, edging out from the safety of the door. His shoulders hunched, waiting to be discovered by nurses coming in briskly from the hallway, or ordered back to his room. He would bolt, if Kray raised his voice.

“Not that side,” was all Kray said, as Galo made to put a skinny knee up on the bed. The shock blanket spared him any fine details of what the bad side looked like, but Galo could see the muscles corded in Kray’s neck, and the stiffness of his lips when he spoke. Galo’s eyes flooded with tears despite himself.

“Does it hurt?” he asked stupidly, but his voice was still nothing more than a soundless motion of air, and Kray didn’t answer him. His shoulders were trembling, perhaps. His fist was clenched in the sheets. 

Galo went meekly to the other side, leaving smudges of dirt and soot on the white sheets, and sat next to Kray there instead, drawing his feet up so he could wrap his arms around his knees. The air seemed to be warmer in this room, although Galo still shivered in his thin paper gown. 

Kray never asked his name. He knew it, probably, from the paperwork, but they didn’t introduce themselves properly at all, that first night. And Galo couldn’t have answered him anyway, even if Kray had asked. Galo couldn’t have told him thank you, or said any of the things that were boiling up in his chest, desperate to come bursting out. 

Instead he bit his lip as the tears came and went, his small hitching breaths the only noise in the room as Kray sat next to him and kept a silent vigil. 

He didn’t remember falling asleep, or toppling slowly sideways into Kray’s lap, although the nurses that found them later told him about it in charmed voices dozens of times, so he could be mortified over and over.

People kept telling him how lucky he was. His chest still hurt and his voice hadn’t come back yet but all the doctors and nurses agreed that he was lucky, and would tell him so every visit. Lucky to be alive, lucky his burns were minor, lucky the smoke inhalation hadn’t been worse. It was the word on everyone’s lips, the first couple days in the hospital. 

Galo thought about Kray’s hand gripping the blankets, bearing up alone without words or tears in that small, cold room with its bright lights, and he didn’t think any of them had been lucky at all. Lucky was getting something for nothing, without sacrifice. 

The nurses looked at each other guiltily when Galo found a pen and notepad and slowly, painstakingly, wrote out a question, asking when he could go home. None of them had an answer for him, except to tell him not to worry. By then he was very tired of people telling him that.

Kray was the one who told him about Burnish fires and how quickly they could destroy. He spoke like an authority on it, when all of Galo’s knowledge of the Burnish had come from television and half-remembered conversations by the adults in another room. He knew, like all children knew, that Burnish were dangerous, and that millions of people had died before he was born, but that wasn’t supposed to have anything to do with the present day. That was all in the past.

It had never occurred to him that something could happen to him personally.

The nurses had given up shooing Galo out of Kray’s room. Kray tolerated his presence as a distraction from his own injuries, which had seen him swathed in so many bandages he looked like a mummy. Kray rarely started any conversations, but he would wait patiently while Galo wrote out questions on his notepad. He didn’t fuss like the nurses or awkwardly run off like the doctors when Galo couldn’t keep the tears down. 

Galo didn’t _want_ to be crying all the time, to be thought of as a hysterical child, but he would be doing something else and then his vision would suddenly become blurred, and he’d feel the painful hot prickling start up and then his notepad would be spattered. There was no stopping it, no predicting it. He balled his fists and threw his notes across the room in a rage once or twice, furious at his own lack of control. It was too much like the fire in his nightmares, crawling up his body, consuming him. 

Kray never batted an eye at his tantrums. Kray would pretend not to see while Galo scrubbed his eyes and went to pick up his notepad, and continue where they left off, listening intently as Kray described in detached, clinical terms the exact rate at which a Burnish fire could eat through wood and steel. Stone. Ice.

Flesh.

_Why do they burn?_ Galo wrote on his notepad, choppy and angry, furious at the tears that kept coming when he didn’t want it. 

“They can’t control it,” Kray told him, his gaze a little fixed on some spot on the wall, the way he got sometimes when he was explaining things. Kray always had an answer for Galo’s questions, even if those answers were sometimes horrifying. “They don’t want to control it.” His lips stretched in something that wasn’t a smile, something bitter and sharp-edged. “They say they have to burn in order to live, but that’s a lie they tell themselves. The truth is that it’s easier to pretend they don’t have any control.” 

“The truth is, they’re weak.” 

The words were almost a hiss in his mouth. Steaming, ever so faintly, in the cool air that stank of disinfectant while Galo looked up at him, wide-eyed.

Galo didn’t understand, then. He wouldn’t for years. He thought of Mad Burnish as zealots and anarchists and hooligans, enjoying the fear and chaos they incited when they roared into a town like a natural disaster. 

He thought of himself as a hero, opposing them.

Later, he would hear about the public outrage against the Burnish. It had to be an attack, people said. A brutal, shocking stab at the heart of society, harkening back to the darkest days of destruction that had led up to the global event. 

The Burnish were showing their true colors, people said, coming into the cities, coming into homes. Committing atrocities without provocation. They needed to be rounded up. They needed to be driven out. 

Reporters with shiny hair and shinier shoes kept showing up at the hospital. They wanted to interview Kray Foresight, the hero of the hour, who had run into a monstrous Burnish fire and rescued a young boy who would have surely otherwise died. They wanted pictures of Galo and Kray together. They asked Galo simple, stupid questions like if he’d been scared, and if he’d been relieved when Kray saved him. They asked Kray for detailed opinions on the Burnish, on the fire, on the rescue. 

They photographed Kray sitting at his bedside, holding Galo’s hand, which had been aesthetically wrapped in bandages even though Galo wasn’t burned very badly at all. They arranged Galo’s bangs to make it seem like he had deep shadows under his eyes, like he was still unwell. They made him look just a little bit more pale, a little bit more gaunt.

They didn’t have to tell him to cry on camera when they pressed him about how bad it had been. 

“It’s a terrible tragedy,” Kray said solemnly, looking handsome and strong and sorrowful. All of his silent stoicism in front of the doctors and nurses had vanished, and Galo, for some reason, thought of stone statues coming to life. Kray didn’t practice stillness in front of these new audiences. He smiled, sadly. He shrugged and gestured, putting his shoulder into view. He tilted his head just the right amount. 

He talked more in front of the reporters than he ever had to Galo, to any of the hospital staff. He lifted his chin into the camera lights. “That the Burnish would dare to do this when we’ve worked so hard for peace… it only proves that they can’t be reasoned with.” 

The interviewers hung on every word. Kray spoke about his research, how it might have saved lives if only it had been ready that night. It was a natural direction of conversation, as everyone asked Kray what could have been done, what should have been done, as if Kray was the expert they’d been looking for, instead of an Ordinary Person Swept Up Into Heroism. 

And Galo became the unwitting poster child for the tragedy, his skinny bandaged arms and his rumpled hospital bed and his silent tears a spur for the city, although everyone was very careful not to let him say anything that might ruin the narrative, once his voice came back. 

The offers and the funding had started coming in immediately. The Foresight Foundation. Somebody somewhere must’ve been delighted by the alliteration and the implication.

We’re looking ahead to the future. We’re going to prevent these things from happening again.

And Galo had been too young to understand. He hadn’t understood even when he’d grown up and thrown himself, as he thought, into the battle. Of course he wanted to be part of it. Of course he felt like he needed to pay it back. He could still remember the horrible noise of the building collapsing, the collective wail of those people. His life, burning down. 

He understood now, when Lio had spat at him that he was a cog in a machine he couldn’t even see.

The apartment building had never been rebuilt by the city. The rubble had been dug out, the bodies recovered, but the lot had been left alone, to grow grass and weeds and gently waving flowers over the ashes and bits of concrete. A grave, because Kray had wanted it that way. He’d wanted people to pass by the ruin and think of resentment. 

Galo had wondered why the movement, a couple years ago, to repurpose the site into something else had failed. Now he doesn’t wonder. Kray wanted a monument. A place to go every year and hold a solemn memorial, with photographers and sad, polished speeches. Galo had always been invited, in his uniform, and given a little a notecard to read about how terrible it had been. To talk about how he’d joined the fight.

The lot is still overgrown. Somebody must mow it down periodically, to keep it from turning into a jungle, but Galo doesn’t know who. There are still pieces of the building hidden among the long grass, like old overgrown headstones, drowned in green. There’s a flat concrete square with memorials heaped on it.

There is even, horribly, a picture of himself from one of those newspaper photoshoots; bandaged, crying, while Kray’s brand new prosthetic arm rests protectively around his skinny shoulders. Somebody had cut it out and framed it, and it makes Galo want to shrink away. 

Every year there’s less and less. All of those lost had been relocated to real cemeteries and everything, and some people leave their memorials there, but Galo had never gone to visit. That felt too personal, for some reason. He hopes like hell nobody had put any pictures of him on those headstones. 

And it was so many people. It would be days of graves. 

For all that he’s the only survivor that ever made the newspapers, Galo still doesn’t feel like he has the right to be responsible for the place. To decide what ought to be done with it, what’s fitting. He wouldn’t know. He’s made the pilgrimage dozens of times and always the thought intrudes, Kray would know what to do. An adult would make the right decision. 

He’s embarrassed about it, still. It’s like something out of a movie, visiting the tragedy that made him or whatever, so he doesn’t make a big deal out of going. He doesn’t talk about it. He’d never felt comfortable with the anniversary spectacle. 

The wind rustles through the long glass and Galo’s boots crunch on tiny, glittering shards of broken glass. 

It’s a wound, he thinks suddenly, that’s never been allowed to heal. The other buildings and the people in them have to look at this every day. It forces the neighborhood to be _about this._ The place is bedraggled and exhausted. Kray had used it like a weapon: don’t you care? Don’t you care about what happened? Don’t you care that it could happen again?

“Hey, everybody,” Galo says awkwardly, quietly. He doesn’t want to sound like he’s making a speech. He doesn’t have a notecard. “Um. I have some news.”

He’d meant it like a confession: that the Burnish hadn’t done this to them. Well, _a_ Burnish had, but not the _the_ Burnish. It had been, like so many other fires in Galo’s career, an accident. Even Kray hadn’t sat down and plotted out how he ought to lose an arm to gain public sympathy. 

He scuffs his toe in the dirt. Should he start with aliens and spaceships? Should he start with Kray being in jail? Maybe he ought to apologize, for how everybody was used as a means to a cruel end. 

Maybe he should start with Lio goddamned Fotia and how nobody warned him that there were people like Lio goddamned Fotia in the world, which is _extremely_ unfair, but he can already imagine how that would sound out loud. ‘So I met somebody…’ 

What would he even say, about Lio? Aina teases him about the forbidden love of firefighter and arsonist and Remi purses his lips in that way where he wants to say something but doesn’t and Varys keeps giving him a thumbs up for some reason and Lucia… well, Lucia had given him some very concerning speeches about fire safety and the use of fire safety equipment. Like, whether the gel was safe for internal use, as if she thought Galo was going to be eating it.

Ignis hadn’t said anything to Galo. Ignis and Lio get into weird staring contests sometimes, which Lio loses because Ignis never takes off his sunglasses. Lio looks away first, as if … admitting to something, although Galo can’t fathom what that would be. 

Probably guilt, Galo thinks. Lio’s burned down a lot of shit in his career, even if he never deliberately tried to kill anybody. Burning shit down is still very traumatic for the people that shit belonged to. 

He could talk about how Lio likes pizza, which had seemed shocking for some reason, even after Lio had given him that big damn speech about Burnish being human beings and needing ordinary human food to survive just like all human beings. Lio likes the pizza that Galo likes, or if he doesn’t he hasn’t made a big deal out of it. Possibly, Lio has spent too much time ruling desert cities out in the wastelands to be picky about pizza flavors. 

Lio will even take off his gloves to eat, and then without looking around tell Galo that it’s rude to stare.

Meis and Gueira spend all their time staring. At him, at the fire station, at the fact that they’re all working together without any shooting or explosions (a miracle!). Galo’s sure they haven’t forgiven him for every time Burning Rescue had kicked their asses, or the collective asses of Mad Burnish in the past. They still kinda act like thugs, but they flinch whenever Heris looks directly at them, and Galo remembers the cold, frozen geometry of the cells. 

Lio is the only one who doesn’t flinch. At anything. Lio is unflinching. Lio is… a lot of things, and Galo could spend all day trying to spit out words that don’t really fit, that aren’t really the right description. Driven? Obsessive? Terrifying?

“Fifty pounds of dynamite in a five ounce package,” Remi says one day, not entirely under his breath, and Varys bursts out laughing. Meis and Gueira waffle between pride and offense over this description. 

Lio pretends not to hear, long-suffering, talking to Heris. Lio is the only one aside from Aina and Ignis who can talk to Heris about-- the experiments. Because Lio is unflinching. Because it needs to be done and of course that means Lio will do it. 

Not a stone Buddha, like Kray had been in that hospital room. Galo thinks instead of a star, blazing in the night sky. A steady, unwavering light, even though you had to know, intellectually, that really stars were roaring, roiling infernos of heat and fury. 

Galo leans on the matoi he’d brought with him (for comfort) and considers. Maybe he’d ask Lio, what the empty lot should become, and Lio wouldn’t have to know what it was or what it represented. Lio would just furrow his brow the way he always did when Galo asked him weird questions. 

“Anyway!” he says out loud, as if continuing a conversation. “So you probably all noticed how the city was like, on fire and stuff the other day…”

*

**Author's Note:**

> I want all of you to appreciate the restraint I showed in not naming this fic "incubate"


End file.
